


give me a memory i can use

by lecornergirl



Category: Pocket Monsters: Sword & Shield | Pokemon Sword & Shield Versions
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), F/M, Friends to Lovers, Introspection, Jealousy, Misunderstandings, Pining, if i had more patience it would be slowburn but it is what it is, in this house we do not ship 12-year-olds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:02:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22702888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lecornergirl/pseuds/lecornergirl
Summary: Growing up, Gloria has always sort of taken it for granted that she’s going to end up marrying Hop.The assumption, the inexorability of it, doesn’t start bothering her until they’re eighteen and taking the first steps of their Gym Challenge. She’s never questioned whether not she loves Hop—she knows she does, knows it like she knows her own name—but for the first time, she wonders about the difference between loving someone and being in love with them.
Relationships: Hop/Yuuri | Gloria
Comments: 4
Kudos: 148





	give me a memory i can use

Growing up, Gloria has always sort of taken it for granted that she’s going to end up marrying Hop.

It’s not an entirely unfounded idea. Both of their parents liked to joke about it, as did Leon. As did everyone they knew, pretty much. 

One of her earliest memories is from when she was about four years old, sitting on the floor of their kitchen, fighting with Hop over Leon’s old stuffed Charizard. Their mums had been sitting at the kitchen table; they were supposedly watching the kids, but most of their attention was on the TV displaying that year’s championship battle. She’d been tugging at the Charizard, when all of a sudden Hop had let go, letting her have it. Grateful, she’d planted a sloppy kiss on his cheek, and one of their mums had sighed. “We’ll be at their wedding before you know it, you know,” she’d said.

Gloria still isn’t quite sure which of their mums had spoken, but the phrase is burned into her mind clear as day. 

It was treated like such an inevitability that for a while, Gloria had assumed that’s how it worked for everyone: you were assigned someone to marry when you were a child, and that was it. Leon spent most of his time with Sonia, so that seemed to fit the pattern. 

What didn’t fit the pattern was the time she saw Leon kissing Raihan in the bushes behind the Wedgehurst train station, but by that time the pattern was starting to fall apart anyway. By that time, she’d started school, and had been met with blank stares several times over when asking her new friends who they were going to marry when they grew up. That’s when she’d realised most seven-year-olds didn’t have someone like Hop.

Gloria considered complaining about it, to her mother, or maybe to Hop himself, but the more she thought about it, marrying Hop really didn’t seem too bad. At the time, all Gloria knew about marriage was that it was two grownups who lived together, and she couldn’t think of anyone she’d rather live with. 

The assumption, the inexorability of it, doesn’t start bothering her until they’re eighteen and taking the first steps of their Gym Challenge. She’s never questioned whether not she loves Hop—she knows she does, knows it like she knows her own name—but for the first time, she wonders about the difference between _loving_ someone and being _in love_ with them.

The thought hits her in the middle of the night, the night before the Opening Ceremony. She and Hop are sharing a room at the Budew Drop Inn—like so many things, sharing a room wasn’t even a question, just an easy default assumption—and Gloria thinks, _if Hop and I were in love, would we really just be lying here, sleeping, only barely touching each other?_

Her only experience of people in love comes from movies and books, from heroines so passionately in love the would throw themselves off bridges if they couldn’t be with the person they loved. They always described love as a flood, a gale-force wind, a roaring inferno; a force of nature. What she feels for Hop isn’t like any of those things. It’s not urgent. It doesn’t take her breath away.

Gloria rolls over, facing away from Hop, and goes to sleep. 

Gloria doesn’t intend to distance herself from Hop, but it happens anyway, a thousand tiny choices she isn’t even aware she’s making until she’s made them. She stops taking the seat next to him, stops addressing everything she says to him. Starts paying more attention to other people, because if she’s not in love with Hop, well, there’s a whole world out there for her to fall in love with. Might as well get started.

The thought feels overwhelming, and her instinct is to turn back to Hop, to fall back into their comfortable, familiar patterns and stop interrogating everything. But surely that’s not fair on Hop, either. 

Part of her wonders if she should tell him about her realisation, but it’s not like he’s ever shown any signs of being in love with her. Maybe he’s always known that all the talk about them getting married is just that—just talk—and she’s the only one who’s ever taken it even kind of seriously. 

It doesn’t seem worth bringing up, just to tell him that she’s _not_ in love with him. So she just laughs the next time he makes a joke about marriage, and doesn’t give it a second thought. 

Hop watches her battle Nessa in Hulbury, and they get lunch at some local seafood restaurant after. He lets her get almost halfway through her meal before he comes out with “So, you know Nessa was flirting with you, right?”

He’s timed it perfectly: she splutters, and the sip of water she was about to swallow is now everywhere except in her mouth. 

“What, during the battle?” she asks, once she’s regained some composure.

“Well, sure,” Hop says, leaning back in his seat, “but like seventy percent of Pokemon battles are at least a little bit flirtatious. Haven’t you ever seen Leon and Raihan battle? The tension _drips_ off of them.”

“Leon and Raihan are dating,” Gloria points out.

“Yes, but you know the tension I mean, right? You can’t tell me you haven’t seen it in other battles. And anyway, that’s not the flirting I’m talking about. I mean the part after the battle, where she kept finding excuses to touch you? Wouldn’t stop complimenting you? Asked if you wanted to hang back and train with her, and you said you already had lunch plans with me?”

Gloria buries her face in her hands. “Okay, in hindsight, I see it. Was I terribly rude?”

Hop laughs, not unkindly. “No, I think your general cluelessness was obvious enough that she got the picture.”

She looks up and narrows her eyes at him. “How do you know all this, anyway?” Her mind fills with images of Hop, easy smile and hair a mess as always, flirting with some faceless stranger. She’s never seen it, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened. Something twists in the pit of her stomach. 

Hop shrugs. “I just pay attention, I guess.”

Someone throws a party in Circhester, at the Hotel Ionia, once most of the remaining Challengers have faced Melony. No one seems to be sure whether or not the party is an official League event, but everyone is there: Challengers, Gym Leaders, even Leon puts in an appearance.

Gloria’s never been much for parties, but she knows she’s expected to put in an appearance. She’s not quite sure when, or why, but somehow she’s become a fan favourite among the Challengers. People will be looking for her tonight.

That doesn’t mean she’s obligated to enjoy it, though, or to do anything other than hover by the snack table and scroll through her phone. Hop is off somewhere being much more social than she is, as per usual.

Someone leans on the wall next to her, and she looks up to see Victor, one of her fellow Challengers. They’re not friends, exactly, but they’ve seen enough of each other the past few weeks to have grown friendly.

“You know,” he says, tone somewhere between conversational and conspiratorial, “I bet the wall would stay up just fine without you holding it up.”

This time, Gloria recognises that she is being flirted with. She tries to muster up a response—she has nothing against Victor, she might as well lean into it—and fails to come up with anything, none of the easy banter that always seems to be on the tip of her tongue when she’s talking to Hop.

“Better not risk it,” she ends up telling Victor, and there’s thinly veiled disappointment on his face when he mutters something about seeing a friend and wanders away again.

Gloria scans the room, wondering if she’s put in enough of an appearance that she can sneak upstairs to her hotel room, when something catches her eye on the other side of the makeshift dance floor. Hop is talking to Marnie, another fellow Challenger, and they look… close. Marnie says something, and Gloria can’t see Hop’s face, but she sees him take a step closer and put his hand on Marnie’s arm.

A wave of something cold washes over her, and she understands, like something has just clicked into place. Of course she’s in love with Hop.

Gloria watches Marnie laugh at something Hop says, and her perspective shifts, just the tiniest bit, making room for this new understanding. It still doesn’t feel quite like a force of nature, like they describe it in the books, but she understands now: it’s different, because it’s her and Hop. It’s not a flood crashing over her, it’s a deep well. It’s not an inferno coursing through her veins, it’s the steady blaze of a fireplace. It’s familiar, it’s comforting, but it’s absolutely love, the _in love_ kind. 

Now that she sees it, she can’t fathom how she’s missed it all these years. 

But Hop is still talking to Marnie, and the gnawing feeling in the pit of her stomach is back. 

Gloria turns and heads for the door, no longer caring whether or not it’s an acceptable time to leave. She’s almost made it into the hallway when there’s a hand on her shoulder, and she turns to see Hop grinning at her. 

“Leaving already?” 

“It’s been a long day, Hop. I just want to go to sleep.”

Hop frowns. “You promised to dance with me at least once.”

Gloria’s stomach drops like she’s just gone over the hill on a rollercoaster. She had, technically, promised. 

“Come on,” Hop wheedles, and she can tell he’s about to whip out his Yamper eyes. She isn’t sure she’s emotionally stable enough for that at the moment, and so she acquiesces.

“Just one song,” she warns him as he tugs her to the dance floor. “Then I’m going to bed.”

The music changes as they reach the centre of the dance floor, shifting into something slow and lyrical. Gloria fights the urge to sigh. Is the universe conspiring against her? Three seconds after realising she’s in love with her best friend while watching him flirt with someone else is not the time to get musically bait-and-switched into slow dancing with him.

And yet here they are, Hop’s hands on her waist and her arms winding around his neck without much conscious input from her brain. He looks down at her, and she can see love in his eyes; she can also see his hand on Marnie’s arm, playing on a loop in her mind. 

Gloria closes her eyes, resting her cheek on his shoulder. She might as well savour it while it lasts.

If she distanced herself from Hop before, after Circhester she’s full-on avoiding him. She sneaks out of the hotel to head towards Spikemuth early the next morning, before anyone else is awake, and channels all of her frustration into beating Piers. She’s in Hammerlocke by the time Hop texts, asking where she is. 

She ignores him and walks in to face Raihan. 

There are more texts from Hop waiting after the battle, and she ignores them too. She waits until she gets to Wyndon before she sends him a picture of the stadium, with the caption _waiting for the champion cup to start, where are you?_

The day before the Champion Cup is chaotic, and she doesn’t end up actually seeing Hop until they’re waiting for the bracket to be announced, about to head onto the pitch for the first matches.

“Hey,” Hop says, sitting next to her on the locker room bench. “Are you okay? I feel like I haven’t seen you in days.”

“I’m fine,” she assures him, but he looks dubious. Before he can ask her again, though, a League official comes to lead Gloria to her first match. She feels his eyes on her the whole way to the pitch.

She ends up facing Hop in the semifinals, and all she can think of is him in the restaurant in Hulbury, saying _seventy percent of Pokemon battles are at least a little bit flirtatious._ She doesn’t think their battle is flirtatious, exactly, but there’s an undercurrent of tension that never used to be there when they battled each other for practice. Every time Hop looks at her she remembers Marnie, and the gnawing in the pit of her stomach is rapidly calcifying into anger. He keeps staring at her, and she throws out attack commands more aggressively than ever before.

The anger carries her through the finals, all the way until she’s facing Leon. The first time she challenges him, her Inteleon-led team doesn’t even make it past his Aegislash. Still fuelled by fury, she’s about to just charge in again, to keep brute-forcing it until she makes it, until she overhears a conversation in the stadium lobby.

“Thinks she’s hot shit, doesn’t she,” a trainer says.

“Well, she only gets two more shots,” her friend says, “so she’d better figure it out fast.”

It stings a little, but she’s heard worse during the Challenge. But the comment makes her slow down and _think_. She’d almost forgotten she only gets three shots at Leon, within three days of the first, before he’s decreed standing Champion. She can’t afford to waste them.

So she grabs a Flying Taxi to the Wild Area. She trains her team up as much as she can, makes some changes, gathers all the candy she can get her hands on.

She returns to Leon, and the playing field is suddenly much more level. Funny how it does that when her team is the same level as his. Gloria has to admit, it’s incredibly satisfying to watch her Coalossal take out Leon’s Charmander in one clean hit. Gotta love Max Rockfall.

Even though she was pretty sure her new team could do it, she’s in a bit of a daze when she walks into the locker room after the match. Hop immediately comes up to her, reaching out to steady her as she stumbles. “What a match!” he says. “Holy shit, marry me.”

The anger Gloria’s been carrying around for the past few days finally finds a target, and she explodes. “Stop!” she cries, wrenching herself out of his grip and turning to face him. “You have to stop joking about marrying me when I know you don’t mean it, please—do you even know how much you’re killing me?” 

Hop stares at her like she’s just told him she’s from an alien planet. She can almost see the gears turning in his brain as he works out what she said, and the only thing it can possibly mean. Finally, he takes a deep breath. “What do you mean I don’t mean it?”

“I saw you with Marnie,” Gloria says, crossing her arms as if they’ll shield her from this conversation somehow. 

“With—Gloria, what exactly do you think you saw?” Hop is frowning, like he doesn’t quite understand how or why the conversation has taken this turn.

“I saw you flirting with her, at the party in Circhester.” 

Hop sighs. “Actually, you saw Marnie flirting with me, and—”

“Is there a difference?” Gloria cuts in.

“Well if you’d just let me finish my sentence,” Hop huffs. “You saw Marnie flirting with me, and me telling her gently but very firmly that I wasn’t interested, because I’m in love with you.”

“Oh.”

“Any other questions?” Hop asks, taking a few steps closer until he’s standing right in front of her.

“I mean, you never—” Gloria flounders for the right words. “I kind of thought you were joking, with the whole marriage thing, because you never… you never acted like you were in love with me.”

“Gloria,” Hop says, and lifts his hand to caress her cheek. “I would marry you tomorrow, if I didn’t think our mothers would disapprove of us getting married so young. I just never dreamed you’d be interested.”

“Yeah, well, it took me a minute to catch on,” Gloria mutters, and Hop laughs.

“I’m glad you figured it out,” he says, and leans down to kiss her. 


End file.
